Serials crisis

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The term serials crisis describes the problem of rising subscription costs of serial publications, especially scholarly journals, outpacing academic institutions' library budgets and limiting their ability to meet researchers' needs. The prices of these institutional or library subscriptions have been rising much faster than inflation for several decades, [1] [2] while the funds available to the libraries have remained static or have declined in real terms. As a result, academic and research libraries have regularly canceled serial subscriptions to accommodate price increases of the remaining subscriptions. [3] [4] The increased prices have also led to the increased popularity of shadow libraries. [5]

Contents

Causes

Price inelasticity

Each journal article reports unique research findings, and as a result, each article is a unique commodity, that cannot be replaced in an academic library collection by another article. The same uniqueness applies to journals, which are collections of articles. In order to conduct a high quality research (and to receive high scores on a grant proposal), the researchers need to have access to every article related to the subject of their work. This situation is very different from the works of art, for which copyright was originally designed. For example, a consumer is not likely to suffer professionally, if he does not see the latest movie or hear a popular song. But missing a relevant research article may result in denial of grant application or expensive duplication of someone else's work. [6]

This unique combination of non-replaceable demand and copyright monopoly leads to the type of price inelasticity not found in other fields, and allows each academic publisher to act as a monopolist, despite the presence of numerous other publishers on the market.

Publishers

Another possible set of factors in this situation includes the increasing domination of scholarly communication by a small number of commercial publishers, whose journals are far more costly than those of most non-profit academic societies. [7] However, the institutional subscription prices for journals published by some academic society publishers (see below) have also exhibited inflationary patterns similar to those seen among commercial publishers.

The earnings of the American Chemical Society (ACS), for example, is based in large parts on publications. In 1999, the income of the ACS was $349 million, where $250 million came from information services. [8] According to a 2004 House of Commons report (by the Science and Technology Committee), [9] the ACS is one of the driving forces of the STM (science, technology, medicine) serials crisis. According to the same report the crisis started around 1990 when many universities and libraries complained about the dramatic inflation of STM subscription prices especially for the flagship Journal of the American Chemical Society, which is exclusively sold as a bundle with all other ACS journals. The report further states that:

the no–cancellation clauses attached to their multi-year multi-journal deals with Elsevier and the American Chemical Society had led to uneven cancellation of titles to make the budget balance. The result is that the little-used Elsevier and ACS titles must remain in the portfolio while the more popular titles by other publishers are cancelled. [9]

Every year the Library Journal publishes a summary of periodical pricing and inflation. "The rate of price increase is analyzed for more than 18,000 e-journal packages handled by EBSCO Information Services...For 2019, the average rate of increase over two years was 5.5%, up slightly from 5% in 2018." [10]

Profitability

A 2021 study found that the cost of publishing a journal article to publishers varies from $200 (in a large-scale platform with a post-publication review) to $1,000 (in a prestigious journal with an acceptance rate under 10%), with $400 per article being the average cost. Also, when the number of published articles in a journal (such as a mega-journal) exceeds 1000, the fixed costs become less than 1% of the direct costs, and the marginal cost of publishing more articles is very small. At the same time, the revenue for most subscription journals is about $4,000 per article. That study estimated the average profit margin of academic journal publishers at ca. 55%. [11]

In a free market, such a high profit margin should have attracted numerous competing publishers. However, in a traditional publishing market, each research article is unique, and the consumer (reader or subscriber) cannot substitute one article (or journal) for another. Instead, the competition occurs on the authors' side: authors have a choice, of where to publish. In an open access publishing model, the market forces are appropriately balanced.

Growth in scholarly publishing

An additional problem is a dramatic increase in the volume of research literature and increasing specialization of that research, i.e. the creation of academic subfields. This includes a growth in the number of scholars and an increase in potential demand for these journals. At the same time, funds available to purchase journals are often decreasing in real terms. Libraries have seen their collection budgets decline in real terms compared to the United States Periodical Price Index. As a result of the increasing cost of journals, academic libraries have reduced their expenditures on other types of publications such as scholarly monographs. [12]

Exchange rates

Currency exchange rates can serve to increase the volatility of subscription prices throughout the world. For example, journal publishers in Europe often set their prices in Euro not United States Dollars, so subscribers in the United States will experience varying prices due to exchange rate fluctuations. The converse is true for European institutions who subscribe to journals published in the United States. As the United States and Europe publish the vast majority of scholarly journals, libraries in other regions are subject to ever greater uncertainty. Although exchange rates can go down as well as up, long-term trends in currency values can lead to chronic price inflation experienced by particular libraries or collections.[ citation needed ]

Response

There is much discussion among case librarians and scholars about the crisis and how to address its consequences. Academic and research libraries are resorting to several tactics to contain costs while maintaining as much access to the latest scholarly research for their users as possible. These include increasingly borrowing journals from one another (see interlibrary loan), purchasing single articles from commercial document suppliers instead of subscribing to whole journals, cancelling subscriptions to the least used or least cost-effective journals, encouraging various methods of obtaining free access to journals, of which black open access provided by Sci-Hub became the most successful, and converting from printed to electronic copies of journals; however publishers sometimes charge more for the online edition of a journal, and price increases for online journals have followed the same inflationary pattern as have journals in paper format. [ citation needed ]

Many individual libraries have joined co-operative consortia that negotiate license terms for journal subscriptions on behalf of their member institutions.[ citation needed ]

Unbundling big deals

A subscription to a bundle of several journals at a discounted price is known as a "big deal". In a big deal a library or consortium of libraries typically pays several million dollars per year to subscribe to hundreds or thousands of toll access journals. [13] By offering such discounted bundled subscriptions, the largest journal publishers were able to squeeze out of the market smaller (often, non-profit and less expensive) publishers, who did not have many journal titles and could not offer a discounted bundle subscription.[ citation needed ]

In the 2010s, efforts increased to "unwrap" or "unbundle" the subscription, if not to cancel them altogether. [14] Services emerged for libraries to share information and reduce the information asymmetry in negotiations with the publishers, like the SPARC cancellation tracking [15] and the Unsub data analysis tool.[ citation needed ]

Open access

Developed in part as a response to the serials crisis, open access models have included new models of financing scholarly journals that may serve to reduce the monopoly power of scholarly journal publishers which is considered a contributing factor to the creation of the serials crisis. These include open access journals and open access repositories. [16]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scientific journal</span> Periodical journal publishing scientific research

In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication intended to further the progress of science, usually by sharing findings from research with readers. They are normally specialized based on discipline, with authors picking which one they send their manuscripts to.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Academic publishing</span> Subfield of publishing distributing academic research and scholarship

Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or thesis. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Academic journal</span> Peer-reviewed scholarly periodical

An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and discussion of research. They nearly universally require peer review for research articles or other scrutiny from contemporaries competent and established in their respective fields.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access</span> Research publications distributed freely online

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elsevier</span> Dutch publishing and analytics company

Elsevier is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as The Lancet, Cell, the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, Trends, the Current Opinion series, the online citation database Scopus, the SciVal tool for measuring research performance, the ClinicalKey search engine for clinicians, and the ClinicalPath evidence-based cancer care service. Elsevier's products and services include digital tools for data management, instruction, research analytics, and assessment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hindawi (publisher)</span> Scientific and medical journal publisher

Hindawi is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals currently active in scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature. It was founded in 1997 in Cairo, Egypt, but purchased in 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, a publishing company based in the United States. The company has its headquarters in London, an office in Cairo, and a virtual office address in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Project Muse</span> Online database of journals and ebooks

Project MUSE, a non-profit collaboration between libraries and publishers, is an online database of peer-reviewed academic journals and electronic books. Project MUSE contains digital humanities and social science content from over 250 university presses and scholarly societies around the world. It is an aggregator of digital versions of academic journals, all of which are free of digital rights management (DRM). It operates as a third-party acquisition service like EBSCO, JSTOR, OverDrive, and ProQuest.

A hybrid open-access journal is a subscription journal in which some of the articles are open access. This status typically requires the payment of a publication fee to the publisher in order to publish an article open access, in addition to the continued payment of subscriptions to access all other content. Strictly speaking, the term "hybrid open-access journal" is incorrect, possibly misleading, as using the same logic such journals could also be called "hybrid subscription journals". Simply using the term "hybrid access journal" is accurate.

In academic publishing, an embargo is a period during which access to academic journals is not allowed to users who have not paid for access. The purpose of this is to ensure publishers have revenue to support their activities, although the impact of embargoes on publishers is hotly debated, with some studies finding no impact while publisher experience suggests otherwise. A 2012 survey of libraries by the Association of Learned, Professional, and Society Publishers on the likelihood of journal cancellations in cases where most of the content was made freely accessible after six months suggests there would be a major negative impact on subscriptions, but this result has been debated.

Scholarly communication involves the creation, publication, dissemination and discovery of academic research, primarily in peer-reviewed journals and books. It is “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use." This primarily involves the publication of peer-reviewed academic journals, books and conference papers.

DPubS, developed by Cornell University Library and Penn State University Libraries, is a free open access publication management software. DPubS arose out of Project Euclid, an electronic publishing platform for journals in mathematics and statistics. DPubS is free software released under Educational Community License.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Cost of Knowledge</span> Protest movement against research publishing house Elsevier and for open science

The Cost of Knowledge is a protest by academics against the business practices of academic journal publisher Elsevier. Among the reasons for the protests were a call for lower prices for journals and to promote increased open access to information. The main work of the project was to ask researchers to sign a statement committing not to support Elsevier journals by publishing, performing peer review, or providing editorial services for these journals.

Academic journal publishing reform is the advocacy for changes in the way academic journals are created and distributed in the age of the Internet and the advent of electronic publishing. Since the rise of the Internet, people have organized campaigns to change the relationships among and between academic authors, their traditional distributors and their readership. Most of the discussion has centered on taking advantage of benefits offered by the Internet's capacity for widespread distribution of reading material.

<i>PeerJ</i> Academic journal

PeerJ is an open access peer-reviewed scientific mega journal covering research in the biological and medical sciences. It is published by a company of the same name that was co-founded by CEO Jason Hoyt and publisher Peter Binfield, with initial financial backing of US$950,000 from O'Reilly Media's O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and later funding from Sage Publishing.

An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making an academic work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. This fee may be paid by the author, the author's institution, or their research funder. Sometimes, publication fees are also involved in traditional journals or for paywalled content. Some publishers waive the fee in cases of hardship or geographic location, but this is not a widespread practice. An article processing charge does not guarantee that the author retains copyright to the work, or that it will be made available under a Creative Commons license.

A mega journal is a peer-reviewed academic open access journal designed to be much larger than a traditional journal by exercising low selectivity among accepted articles. It was pioneered by PLOS ONE. This "very lucrative publishing model" was soon emulated by other publishers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sci-Hub</span> Scientific research paper file sharing website

Sci-Hub is a shadow library website that provides free access to millions of research papers, regardless of copyright, by bypassing publishers' paywalls in various ways. Unlike Library Genesis, it does not provide access to books. Sci-Hub was founded in Kazakhstan by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011, in response to the high cost of research papers behind paywalls. The site is extensively used worldwide. In September 2019, the site's operator(s) said that it served approximately 400,000 requests per day. In addition to its intensive use, Sci-Hub stands out among other shadow libraries because of its easy use/reliability and because of the enormous size of its collection: a 2021 study estimated, that Sci-Hub provided access to 95% of all scholarly publications with issued DOI numbers, and on 15 July 2022 Sci-Hub reported that its collection comprises 88,343,822 files.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access in France</span> Overview of the culture and regulation of open access in France

In France, open access to scholarly communication is relatively robust and has strong public support. Revues.org, a digital platform for social science and humanities publications, launched in 1999. Hyper Articles en Ligne (HAL) began in 2001. The French National Center for Scientific Research participated in 2003 in the creation of the influential Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. Publishers EDP Sciences and OpenEdition belong to the international Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of open access</span>

The idea and practise of providing free online access to journal articles began at least a decade before the term "open access" was formally coined. Computer scientists had been self-archiving in anonymous ftp archives since the 1970s and physicists had been self-archiving in arXiv since the 1990s. The Subversive Proposal to generalize the practice was posted in 1994.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Subscribe to Open</span> Open access academic publishing model

Subscribe to Open (S2O) is an economic model used by peer-reviewed scholarly journals to provide readers with open access (OA) to the journal’s content, without charging costs to authors. S2O converts journals that have a traditional subscription model to open access.

References

  1. ↑ Romaine, Stephen Bosch, Barbara Albee, and Sion. "Are We There Yet? | Periodicals Price Survey 2022". Library Journal. Archived from the original on March 10, 2023. Retrieved March 10, 2023.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  2. ↑ Buranyi, Stephen (June 27, 2017). "Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?". The Guardian. Archived from the original on September 27, 2020. Retrieved April 10, 2022.
  3. ↑ White, Sonya; Creaser, Claire, Trends in Scholarly Journal Prices 2000–2006, UK: lboro, doi: 10.1087/095315108X323866 , S2CID   206006218 .
  4. ↑ Sample, Ian (April 24, 2012). "Harvard University says it can't afford journal publishers' prices". The Guardian. Archived from the original on November 29, 2019. Retrieved April 10, 2022.
  5. ↑ Himmelstein, Daniel S; Romero, Ariel Rodriguez; Levernier, Jacob G; Munro, Thomas Anthony; McLaughlin, Stephen Reid; Greshake Tzovaras, Bastian; Greene, Casey S (February 9, 2018). Rodgers, Peter A (ed.). "Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature". eLife. 7: e32822. doi: 10.7554/eLife.32822 . ISSN   2050-084X. PMC   5832410 . PMID   29424689.
  6. ↑ Article processing charge hyperinflation and price insensitivity: An open access sequel to the serials crisis. 2019. LIBER Q. 29/1. S.Y.S. Khoo. doi: 10.18352/lq.10280.
  7. ↑ McAfee, "Summary", Journal (PDF), Caltech, archived (PDF) from the original on February 4, 2007, retrieved July 2, 2007.
  8. ↑ "Returning Science to the Scientists" (PDF). Münchner Buchwissenschaft an der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. 2009. Archived (PDF) from the original on September 23, 2013. Retrieved June 12, 2010.
  9. 1 2 "Scientific Publications: Free for all?" (PDF). House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. 2009. Archived (PDF) from the original on July 15, 2017. Retrieved June 2, 2011.
  10. ↑ "Deal or No Deal: Periodicals Price Survey 2019". Library Journal. 2019. Archived from the original on October 2, 2019. Retrieved September 11, 2019.
  11. ↑ Current market rates for scholarly publishing services. 2021. F1000Research. 10/20. A. Grossmann, B. Brembs. doi: 10.12688/f1000research.27468.1.
  12. ↑ Sherman, Scott. "University Presses Under Fire". The Nation . No. 26 May 2014. Archived from the original on June 30, 2015. Retrieved March 6, 2015.
  13. ↑ Edlin, Aaron S.; Rubinfeld, D. L. (2004). "Exclusion or efficient pricing? The "big deal" bundling of academic journals". Antitrust Law Journal. 72 (1): 119–157. Archived from the original on February 27, 2021. Retrieved April 18, 2020.
  14. ↑ McKenzie, Lindsay (May 8, 2018). "'Big Deal' Cancellations Gain Momentum". Inside Higher Ed. Archived from the original on March 10, 2023. Retrieved March 10, 2023.
  15. ↑ "Big Deal Cancellation Tracking – SPARC". Archived from the original on June 30, 2018. Retrieved June 30, 2018.
  16. ↑ Kingsley, Danny (2006). "Open access publishing: a solution to the serials crisis?". Australasian Science (2006), Pp. 34–36. Archived from the original on March 5, 2023. Retrieved March 10, 2023.

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